Testing laboratories
Results often reach the prescriber by fax, for want of a secure messaging system shared by the laboratory and the practice.
Healthcare
Fax in healthcare: who still uses it, and why
Medicine is the last large-scale user of fax in Europe. The reason is not technical lag: it is the confidentiality regime that applies to health data.
Short answer
Practices, testing laboratories, hospitals and emergency departments still exchange reports, prescriptions and test requests by fax. The telephone line forms a closed channel: the document is deposited on no mail server along the way.
Who still requires it
Hospital departments
Admission requests, transfers and operative reports move between departments over a channel that depends on no outside supplier.
Community practice
Isolated practices still receive letters from colleagues, certificates and renewal requests by fax.
What the framework imposes
Health data falls under a reinforced regime: certified hosting for storage, traceability of access, and fewer intermediaries. Fax is not exempt from those rules, but it removes the step where the document rests on a third-party server. That is precisely the step email-to-fax gateways put back.
Frequently asked questions
- Is fax compliant with data protection law for health data?
- Nothing forbids it, but compliance does not rest on the channel: it rests on the processing. You need a lawful basis, a defined retention period, and certainty that the target machine belongs to the professional concerned.
- What if a medical fax reaches the wrong machine?
- That is a data breach. It is recorded in the internal register and, where the risk to the person is high, notified to the supervisory authority. The transmission report identifies precisely which machine answered.
General information. It replaces neither legal advice nor the opinion of your organisation's data protection officer.
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